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The opponent was obviously a lobbyist for the petro industry, a very well paid lawyer hired by the industry to sway opinion. This person was paid with money provided by you and me. Petroleum subsidies. He for some reason doesn’t mention this. I can understand him spouting this drivel; he is paid very well to do so. You and I however don’t have the same excuse. Even if you don’t believe in global warming nobody can deny that we are running out of fossil fuels. Nobody can deny the bulk of these products come from other countries and unstable countries at that. How can it not be in our best interest to be among the leaders in new technology? If these new industries need a little boost, what is the problem. Cut petro subsidies and use a portion of the savings to prop up the future. There will be a big fight from those who stand to lose money.

Way to shine a light Middle.
Whenever you see a statement like this in an article-
They say the wind industry should be left to compete in the free market with other energy sources without taxpayer subsidy or “energy welfare.”

You know the Friends of Fossil are still pumping their disinformation. They certainly could not survive without the tremendous corporate welfare they have had built into the system over the decades.

I sat next to a man at the Environmental Congress last night who still believed there was 250 years worth of coal in the US ready to make cheap electricity. He believes what he is told by his news sources, and the Friends are running his News sources.

Wind is cheap right now, and the price of fuel will not go up. Guaranteed.

The article is not accurate; Minnesota does not get 13% of its power from wind. It does get 13% from renewables but only about 9% or so is from wind. This number is always miss stated, most likely on purpose and the information is available to the public at the US Energy Info Admin. It would be nice to see a journalist for once reference some sources.
Either way you look at it if you are for or against wind you can’t get past the intermittent operation. Based on Minnesota’s 2010 installed capacity of 2009 Megawatts of wind if they were online all year you could produce about 17.5 million megawatt/hrs, they only produced 4.8 million megawatt/hrs. So you go about 27 percent of what they are capable of. This can’t be a base load power system unless you can convince people to only want electricity 27% of the time. So that requires you to have a different power source as backup, coal, nuclear or gas. We already know that everyone at the “Environmental Congress” are against these options so what is the solution. If you close all the coal/nuclear plants in Minnesota you need to replace about 6400 MW of power, and this is power that is always available. It is only about 12500 wind turbines which will still not guarantee you have power.
The popular choice is to build gas power plants to back-up the poor efficiency of wind, so basically you build two plants, one wind and one gas. At double the cost of just building one gas plant. Then add in the fact that people like “Ranger” are against fracking which provides the cheap gas everyone is talking about so don’t believe it will continue down its current path. We all know what they think of nuclear, so basically they have no solution besides taking the opposite position as the so called bought and paid for oil lobbyist. One refuses to do anything but status queue and the others are living in a world where it is acceptable to live in a cardboard hut with power 27 percent of the time it is required. Also don’t for a minute believe that the number of people employed by wind energy even touches the number of people looking forward to losing their jobs due to killing coal and nuclear, gas fracking, copper mining (which is needed for the wind transmission lines).